For the first quarter (ending June), Japanese firm Sony said total group sales totalled around £11.5 billion, which was up 13 per cent on the first quarter last year.

Sony said it sold 9.6 million smartphones - including the Xperia range - in the three month period, which was a healthy increase on the 7.4 million smartphones it sold in the same quarter a year ago.

This led to the company seeing an operating profit in its mobile and PC unit, totalling £40 million, after it made a loss last year.

Sony's total group operating profit increased to £244 million, while its net profit came in at a slender £23 million.

In the summer NTT campaign, says Reuters, the company is said to have sold under 700,000 Samsung phones, short of a 1 million target, as opposed to the 1.3 million Sony Xperia A handsets sold in the same campaign.

Although NTT will still sell new Samsung phones as they come onto the market, the fact that Samsung, the world's biggest smartphone manufacturer by sales, is being excluded from NTT's main winter drive, will be a surprise in some quarters.